Medical Knowledge and Practice

In 1666 Rebeckah Winche (d. 1713) began putting together a new recipe book. She inscribed her name in the front and back of the book and, over the next few decades, filled the book with 150 recipes including instructions to make medicines to ease childbirth, to cure kidney stones, worms, colic, king’s evil, convulsion fits and the plague. This medical know-how was stored alongside recipes for lemon and milk cream, cheese, sausages, dry apricots and conserve of roses. Rebeckah also used her notebook to record important events in her family. Turning her notebook upside down, she entered the dates of birth, death and marriage of three generations of Winche kin in the back pages. The entries portray a family continually confronted with new life and death. Perhaps none more so than the entry from September 1654, when Rebeckah welcomed her first born, Judith, and then just days later recorded that ‘my Father sicken’d that day she was crisene’d’. In all, in the fifty years covered by the records, Rebeckah had buried both her parents, her father-in-law and seven grandchildren. It is no wonder that health, sickness and death were continually on her mind. As it stands, like many such objects, Rebeckah Winche’s recipe book is a testament to her continued interests in medical and culinary knowledge and family history. For early modern women such as Rebeckah, family, food and medicine went hand-in-hand